MERCATORNET: GOVERNOR BROWN, DO NOT SIGN THE DEATH WARRANT OF UNHAPPY PEOPLE

My daughter was the victim of assisted suicide, but she is not the only one.

Right now, a law hurriedly pushed through the California legislature after multiple defeats sits on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown and awaits his signature. As both a mother and a nurse I beg Governor Brown to veto it.

In 2009, I lost a beautiful, physically well 30-year-old daughter, Marie, to suicide after a 16-year battle with substance abuse and other issues. Her suicide was like an atom bomb dropped on our family, friends and even her therapists.
Despite all of our efforts to save her, my Marie told me that she learned how to kill herself from visiting suicide/assisted suicide websites and reading Derek Humphry’s book Final Exit. Derek Humphry is the founder of The Hemlock Society, now included with other assisted suicide groups and known as Compassion and Choices. The medical examiner called Marie’s suicide technique “textbook final exit” but her death was neither dignified nor peaceful.

Marie was not mere collateral damage in the controversy over physician-assisted suicide. She was a victim of the physician-assisted suicide movement, seduced by the rhetoric of a painless exit from what she believed was a hopeless life of suffering.

Adding to our family’s pain, at least two people close to Marie became suicidal not long after her suicide. Luckily, these two young people received help and were saved, but suicide contagion, better known as “copycat suicide”, is a well-documented phenomenon. Often media coverage or publicity around one death encourages other vulnerable people to commit suicide in the same way.

Think of Brittany Maynard, the young woman with a brain tumour who moved to Oregon to kill herself last November with a doctor prescribed overdose. Weeks before she killed herself, Ms. Maynard partnered with the well-funded Compassion and Choices organization to raise even more money to promote the legalization of physician-assisted suicide throughout the US.
There was an immediate and unprecedented media frenzy surrounding Ms. Maynard’s tragic story that routinely portrayed her pending suicide as “heroic” and even counting down the days to her suicide. Personally, I thought this looked like a crowd on the street shouting for a suicidal person on a window ledge to jump, but the narrative worked with much of the public.

One problem with the media frenzy is that it violated well-established public health standards for how we talk about suicide. The National Institute for Mental Health has warnings about reporting on suicidethat include “Risk of additional suicides increases when the story explicitly describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/graphic headlines or images, and repeated/extensive coverage sensationalizes or glamorizes a death.” (emphasis added) Instead, the NIHM recommends including “up-to-date local/national resources where reader/viewers can find treatment, information and advice that promote help-seeking”.

However, Compassion and Choices even denies that physician-assisted suicide is suicide, insisting instead that the media use euphemisms like “aid-in-dying” and “death with dignity” in cases like Ms. Maynard’s. However, this defies common sense and even the definition of suicide as “the intentional taking of one’s own life.” Apparently, there are reasons for this:A 2013 Pew Research Center poll showed that public opinion on physician-assisted suicide law is closely divided, with 47 percent of US adults approving and 49 percent disapproving.A Gallup poll article showed eliminating the term “suicide” in public polls on assisted suicide laws can increase support by as much as 20 percent. Changing the terminology of assisted suicide also allows immunity for assisting medical professionals and gets around standard life insurance policiesthat deny payouts for suicides occurring in the first two years of a policy.

I have been a registered nurse for 46 years, working in intensive care, oncology, hospice and home health among other specialties. Personally and professionally, I have cared for many people who attempt or consider killing themselves.
Some of these people were old, chronically ill or had disabilities. Some were young and physically healthy. A few were terminally ill. I cared for all of them to the best of my ability without discrimination as to their condition, age, socioeconomic status, race or gender. I will do anything to help my patients — except kill them or help them kill themselves.

It is outrageous that physician assisted suicide laws support privatized lethal overdoses for some suicidal people without even the oversight and protections we insist upon for a convicted murderer on death row. Suicide prevention and treatment works, and the standards must not be changed just because some people insist their desire for physician-assisted suicide is rational and even a civil right.

Yet, the assisted-suicide movement relentlessly continues to demand the participation of medical professionals like me and the approval of society for at least some suicides — for now. Those demands must be denied.

My daughter Marie was a victim of these demands to control life by embracing death. How many more people must we lose before we truly understand that evil never limits itself because evil always seeks to expand unless it is stopped. In the case of physician-assisted suicide, “No” can be a life-saving word.

This article is published by Nancy Valko and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees.

3 thoughts on “MERCATORNET: GOVERNOR BROWN, DO NOT SIGN THE DEATH WARRANT OF UNHAPPY PEOPLE”

Hi Nancy, I am very sorry for your loss. I lost my mother to cancer and she finally passed away at the age of forty nine. Her last few months were painful to say the least. I am an optimist by nature and believe in facing life head on. I have been through challenging times in my life and would never consider suicide in any form as an escape from the challenges life brings. However If I am ever faced by a medical condition such as Alzheimers or a condition which will cause me undue hardship and pain and will cause a change in my nature and disposition such that I fail to resemble the person I am today, I would definitely choose assisted suicide. Why is this “evil?” Why is this not my choice? Why will you not afford me the freedom to give up my life when I choose?

I am also sorry for the loss of your mother. I know how painful that loss can be.

I lost my own mother at age 63 from a rare form of thyroid cancer and she also had Alzheimer’s. I took care of her until she died and, as I promised my dad, she was comfortable until her death and my dad received the support he needed. I also cared for my aunt with pancreatic cancer, my grandmother who had a stroke, my daughter Karen who was born with a life-threating heart condition and my grandson who died at age 6 from a rare autoimmune disease.

Making sure these people lived well and as comfortably as possible until natural death was not only a comfort to me personally but also is an achievable end of life goal that must be taught to all medical professionals and available to all families.

Over my nursing career, I also cared for burn victims, severely brain-injured people, people paralyzed from accidents, people with every kind of terminal cancer, hospice patients, etc. Never once was I tempted to “help” end anyone’s life. Instead, I was determined to make sure these patients were well cared for and their families supported even when death beccame inevitable. As a result, I became a better nurse and I believe a better person.

I will do anything for my patients and loved ones-except kill them or help them kill themselves. Legalization of medical killing destroys the first rule of a civilized society: We don’t kill each other.

Legally forcing doctors and nurses to change their ethics, education, and practice to accommodate any person’s choice to be killed is dangerous not only to a patient-safe health care system but to all of us. That is evil.